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Why Now Is the Best Time Ever to Be a Game Developer

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D4: Dawn of the Dreaming Director's Drama (GDC Next 10)

Using Plot Devices to Create Gameplay in Storyteller (GDC Next 10)

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Luck and Skill in Games

Minimalist Game Design for Mobile Devices

Broken Age: Rethinking a Classic Genre for the Modern Era (GDC Next 10)

GDC 2011 Category

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Cinematic Character Lighting in STAR WARS: THE OLD REPUBLIC

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SKU#: GDC11-12133

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Description: Cinematic Character Lighting in STAR WARS: THE OLD REPUBLIC
SPEAKER/S: Ben Cloward (Bioware) and Aaron Otstott (Bioware)
DAY / TIME / LOCATION: Wednesday 1:30- 2:30 Room 3002, West Hall 3rd Fl.
TRACK / FORMAT: Visual Arts , Programming / Lecture
DESCRIPTION: In developing a system for character lighting in STAR WARS: THE OLD REPUBLIC, the team at Bioware faced several unique challenges. First, the lighting needed to support the game's unique visual style. Second, it needed to give emphasis to the characters and separate them from the background. Finally, the system needed to provide an automatic way to achieve quality lighting for the enormous number of cinematics. These goals were achieved by introducing several key elements to the lighting system. This talk will discuss these elements, and show how they work together to create cinematic quality character lighting.
TAKEAWAY: Attendees will get an in-depth look at the system developed for character lighting in STAR WARS: THE OLD REPUBLIC. The talk will cover non-traditional lighting methods used to achieve the painterly visual style, the automation of cinematic quality lighting, and lessons learned along the way.
INTENDED AUDIENCE: Technical artists and graphics programmers will receive a high level discussion of lighting and shader techniques. While some specific programming techniques will be discussed, the talk with include illustrations that make technical concepts clear to non-technical developers. Character and environment artists are also encouraged to attend.

Punching Above Your Weight: Small Art Teams, Big Games

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SKU#: GDC11-12132

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Description: The Animation of HALO REACH: Raising the Bar
SPEAKER/S: Joe Spataro (Bungie) and Tam Armstrong (Bungie)
DAY / TIME / LOCATION: Wednesday 10:30-11:30 Room 3007, West Hall 3rd Fl.
TRACK / FORMAT: Visual Arts , Production / Lecture
DESCRIPTION: The animation quality bar for HALO: REACH was much higher than HALO 3 and needed to maintain the feel of a HALO game. We discuss the challenges we overcame and the concessions we made to ship on time and on budget with better quality.
TAKEAWAY: The attendee will gain perspective on the production, animation, design, and engineering techniques we employed to overcome the challenges of shipping animation in our last HALO game. They will also gain insight into general techniques that can improve any animation pipeline.
INTENDED AUDIENCE: Attendees who are interested in animation, and animation engineering, or who are simply interested in hearing about the challenges related to these disciplines that we faced during the production of HALO: REACH are our target audience. No prerequisite knowledge is required.

The Animation of HALO REACH: Raising the Bar

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SKU#: GDC11-12131

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Practical Occlusion Culling on PS3

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SKU#: GDC11-12130

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Description: Practical Occlusion Culling on PS3
SPEAKER/S: Will Vale (Second Intention Limited)
DAY / TIME / LOCATION: Thursday 9:00-10:00 Room 304, South Hall
TRACK / FORMAT: Programming / Lecture
DESCRIPTION: Games always have too much stuff to render, but are often set in occluded environments, where much of what is in the view frustum is not visible to the camera. Occlusion culling tries to avoid rendering objects which the player can't see.

Discussion of occlusion for games has tended to focus on the use of GPU pixel counters to determine whether or not an object is visible. This places additional stress on a limited resource, and has latency which has to be worked around, requiring a more complex pipeline.

For KILLZONE 3 we took a different approach - we use the SPUs to render a conservative depth buffer and perform queries against it. This allows us to cull objects very early in the frame, avoiding any pipeline costs for invisible objects.

This presentation talks about the ideas (and dead ends) we explored along the way, as well as explaining in detail what we ended up with.
TAKEAWAY: Attendees will see how we used occlusion culling in KILLZONE 3 to improve rendering performance and simplify the art process.

They will learn in detail how the system was built, and the impact on the game at all levels - how we create and render the occluder data, the kind of queries we use, and how we reached the level of performance we needed.

This is a warts-and-all talk covering the research and development process as well as the end result.
INTENDED AUDIENCE: This talk is most suitable for programmers with some SPU and/or graphics pipeline experience. Also relevant to technical artists and system architects looking for ways to improve the rendering pipeline.

Forensic Debugging: How to Autopsy, Repair, and Reanimate a Release-built Game

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SKU#: GDC11-12129

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Description: Forensic Debugging: How to Autopsy, Repair, and Reanimate a Release-built Game
SPEAKER/S: Elan Ruskin (Valve Corporation)
DAY / TIME / LOCATION: Wednesday 1:30- 2:30 Room 304, South Hall
TRACK / FORMAT: Programming / Lecture
DESCRIPTION: Crashes are tough to debug: unpredictable, hard to reproduce, and often found in optimized release builds where a debugger's watch window fails to work. See how Valve captures and processes crash dumps from testers, servers, and customers to solve stability problems even after release. Learn how to read CPU state and system memory to diagnose stability and other release-only problems on PC, Mac, Xbox 360, PS3, and Linux, without having to rely on reproducibility or wasteful trial and error. We'll demonstrate case studies on extracting variable contents, game state, and the signatures of some typical game stability issues.
TAKEAWAY: Learn how to dissect a crash dump to determine your game's cause of death, and go deeper to diagnose release mode executables when debuggers fail. See automated tools for gathering stability information from customers and supporting your title even after it's live.
INTENDED AUDIENCE: This talk is for coders of all levels interested in advanced debugging skills and tools for tracking and improving game stability throughout its lifecycle. Basic familiarity with C++ and platform debugging tools is assumed.

Mega Meshes - Modeling, Rendering and Lighting a World Made of 100 Billion Polygons

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SKU#: GDC11-12128

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Description: Mega Meshes - Modeling, Rendering and Lighting a World Made of 100 Billion Polygons
SPEAKER/S: Ben Sugden (Lionhead Studios) and Michal Iwanicki (Lionhead Studios)
DAY / TIME / LOCATION: Friday 11:00-12:00 Room 3007, West Hall 3rd Fl.
TRACK / FORMAT: Programming / Lecture
DESCRIPTION: MILO AND KATE is an Xbox360 title in development at Lionhead Studios.

This presentation introduces an innovative pipeline where we moved from a conventional content-creation workflow to building and painting our world using mesh sculpting tools alone, working entirely in 3D, eliminating the need for artists to consider both texture budgets and UV parametrization.

We describe algorithms to handle these multi-billion polygon assets, discuss our virtual texture streaming system, together with how to deal with common implementation issues. We follow with a description of a novel real-time global illumination solution we have developed and a survey of alternative approaches.
TAKEAWAY: Attendees will learn a new approach to modeling environment assets, providing a more artist oriented workflow. They will gain ideas to solve common problems with virtual texture streaming, compression and processing of these extremely detailed models. They will benefit from our research into computing indirect illumination in real time.
INTENDED AUDIENCE: The talk is primarily targeted towards graphics, tools or engine programmers or technical artists. Some knowledge of existing graphics pipelines and lighting models may be beneficial but is not required. The talk is targeting intermediate to advanced level.

HALO: REACH Effects Tech

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SKU#: GDC11-12127

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Description: HALO: REACH Effects Tech
SPEAKER/S: Chris Tchou (Bungie LLC)
DAY / TIME / LOCATION: Friday 10:05-10:30 Room 3002, West Hall 3rd Fl.
TRACK / FORMAT: Programming , Visual Arts / Lecture
DESCRIPTION: The goal of effects in HALO: REACH was to provide a more atmospheric, dense and visceral experience. We found a number of graphical techniques to be particularly useful and effective. A greater density of small transient particles was handled by a custom colliding particle system run entirely on the GPU. This system handled 24,000 colliding particles in the shipping game in less than 0.3 ms per frame. A greater presence of atmospheric and smoke effects was enabled through a low-res transparent rendering system that could effectively sort with high-res transparents through dynamic layer grouping. Finally, the depth buffer proved to be an effective way to cheaply create the illusion of world interaction on a number of effects, most prominently used in character shields, boundary markers and electrical effects. Lots of video and details provided!
TAKEAWAY: Attendees will learn some practical, effective and cheap methods for enhancing effects on the Xbox 360 platform, including cheap colliding GPU particles, low-res sorted transparents and depth-sourced shading effects.
INTENDED AUDIENCE: This presentation is geared primarily towards graphics engineers and technical artists. Although there is something for everyone, full understanding of some parts may require knowledge of rendering and shading techniques.

I Shot You First: Networking the Gameplay of HALO: REACH

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SKU#: GDC11-12126

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Description: I Shot You First: Networking the Gameplay of HALO: REACH
SPEAKER/S: David Aldridge (Bungie LLC)
DAY / TIME / LOCATION: Thursday 3:00- 5:00 Room 304, South Hall
TRACK / FORMAT: Programming / Lecture
DESCRIPTION: Gameplay networking is easy once you have a socket open! Find out all the things that are wrong with that statement in this gripping tale of the perilous minefield that lies between sockets and game code. This talk describes in detail the patterns and processes that have allowed Bungie to repeatedly set new standards for gameplay networking quality. Come see how we develop competitive game mechanics that are fun over the internet, learn what kinds of network introspection tools you need to build into your next online game, and marvel at the low-tech way we measure lag. This is a 2-hour lecture.
TAKEAWAY: Attendees will learn to recognize opportunities for optimization and lag compensation in their own gameplay networking logic, and will be familiar with the techniques Bungie uses to build great online action games, which can be applied to optimize any networking architecture. Attendees will never again refer to game networking as sockets programming.
INTENDED AUDIENCE: Aspiring or current engineers and designers on titles that include online gameplay. Some game development experience is recommended, but not required. There will be no math or code.

Automated Level of Detail Generation for HALO: REACH

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SKU#: GDC11-12125

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Description: Automated Level of Detail Generation for HALO: REACH
SPEAKER/S: Xi Wang (Bungie LLC)
DAY / TIME / LOCATION: Friday 9:30- 9:55 Room 3002, West Hall 3rd Fl.
TRACK / FORMAT: Programming , Visual Arts / Lecture
DESCRIPTION: This presentation introduces the LoD system created for HALO: REACH. The basic idea is to use a low-res vertex-shaded model to render far away objects. It starts with a voxel-based geometry decimation which can robustly simplify the geometry of game objects. We also designed a BRDF-fitting module, which can fit the many complicated material models used in our game to a simplified general material model. Both geometry and material simplification are farm-based. It is a fully automated LoD pipeline for content production, which massively reduced the workload of the content team, and boosted runtime performance significantly.
TAKEAWAY: Attendees will learn some practical algorithms and ideas about LoD, like robust mesh decimation and an automatic shader/material simplification method. They can incorporate those techniques into their own LoD solutions. Also, the overall design of the farm pipeline will provide some general knowledge about how to design an automated LoD system to make it work with the real game production pipeline.
INTENDED AUDIENCE: Graphics engineers, tool engineers and tech artistes.

(Japanese Version) PS3 and NDS, the Two Extreme FINAL FANTASY Series

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SKU#: GDC11-12122JP

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Description: PS3 and NDS, the Two Extreme FINAL FANTASY Series
SPEAKER/S: Mitsuto Suzuki (Square Enix)
DAY / TIME / LOCATION: Thursday 1:30- 2:30 Room 135, North Hall
TRACK / FORMAT: Audio / Lecture
DESCRIPTION: On different platforms, music is played via different playback formats. The two projects I was simultaneously involved in as a music arranger, FINAL FANTASY: THE FOUR HEROES OF LIGHT and FINAL FANTASY XIII, were developed in NDS and PS3 respectively. From that experience, I would like to compare and contrast the playback formats used in NDS and PS3, share how I dealt with the drawbacks and the advantages of the two platforms, and talk about what the future challenges of game music design, regardless of the platforms. [This session will not be audio or video recorded.]
TAKEAWAY: From this lecture, the attendee will amass the knowledge of platform-dependent game music design techniques, learn how the audio staff can make persuading suggestions to the main game development, and experience the pleasurable feeling of the game and its music coming together as one
INTENDED AUDIENCE: Video game musicians who specialize and challenge to find novel expressions in video game music. Video game musicians who are seeking to make proposals to the game from the audio perspective.

(English Version) PS3 and NDS, the Two Extreme FINAL FANTASY Series

Price:$3.95

SKU#: GDC11-12122EN

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Your Best Weapon Is Your Community! How to Create a Social Ecosystem Across Multiple Platforms

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SKU#: GDC11-12095

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Description: Your Best Weapon Is Your Community! How to Create a Social Ecosystem Across Multiple Platforms
SPEAKER/S: Chris Bruce (Sony Computer Entertainment Europe)
DAY / TIME / LOCATION: Thursday 9:00-10:00 Room 130, North Hall
TRACK / FORMAT: Production / Lecture
DESCRIPTION: Traditional AAAgames have a high purchase cost, and consumers rely on official websites, demos and press to aid purchasing decisions. In contrast, casual & mobile games increasingly leverage social networks and freemium business models to drive growth.

Every game creates user generated content which can be surfaced through varying channels, all of which have the potential to turn players into powerful advocates for your game.

This session explores how current & emerging social and casual gaming mechanisms can be exploited by game franchises on a range of platforms, utilizing social networks to drive repeat play and sales.
TAKEAWAY: Attendees will learn about using different development approaches to engage with different types of user: non-engaged, casual, and the hardcore, and the returns on investment and potential pitfalls offered by these options.
INTENDED AUDIENCE: Developers and Producers who are considering broadening their audience through application development on social networks and alternative platforms, and seek new ways of engaging their audience and extending the time spent playing their game.

ONE FALLS FOR EACH OF US: The Prototyping of Tragedy

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SKU#: GDC11-12073

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Description: ONE FALLS FOR EACH OF US: The Prototyping of Tragedy
SPEAKER/S: Brenda Brathwaite (Loot Drop)
DAY / TIME / LOCATION: Thursday 4:30- 5:30 Room 135, North Hall
TRACK / FORMAT: Game Design , Visual Arts / Lecture
DESCRIPTION: Incorporating 50,000 wooden figurines, each painted by hand, Brenda Brathwaites latest game is ONE FALLS FOR EACH of US. It is the fourth game in the Mechanic is the Message series, takes up an entire room, is intentionally inconvenient to set up and chronicles the experience of the Native Americans as they walked and died upon the Trail of Tears. Like the other games in the series, Brathwaite uses the medium of the game mechanic much like traditional artists use paint to capture and express difficult events. It is a form of historical system design which provokes both player and designer to look and interact more deeply than they otherwise might. Influenced by the works of Jackson Pollock, Richard Serra, Marcel Duchamp and Gerhard Richter, Brathwaites works push games in directions not yet considered. From the games initial conception through to its current state, Brathwaite discusses the inspirations for ONE FALLS FOR EACH of US and the series, recent iterations and expands upon the prototyping of tragedy and offers direction on how our own real world experiences can serve as needed catharsis and inspiration in any type of game.
TAKEAWAY: Attendees are encouraged to look beyond traditional game design patterns and expectations and are invited to explore beyond the memes that surround the necessity and definition of fun. Most importantly, game designers are encouraged to look for inspiration, trust and catharsis in the most unlikely places.

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